This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Seventeen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come. The subscription window that includes Issue Seventeen is open now. To get Issue Seventeen when it ships in early October, you can sign up for a subscription here. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Seventeen is coming your way soon! ___________________________________ Andrew Hunter – ”Finding a...
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Seventeen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come. The subscription window that includes Issue Seventeen is open now. To get Issue Seventeen when it ships in early October, you can sign up for a subscription here. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Seventeen is coming your way soon! ___________________________________ Michael Updegraff – "Restoring...
In this new episode of the podcast, Joshua and Mike talk about the proverbial practice of making hay while the sun is shining – as soon as the days start to get longer in the Maine spring, it’s time to get to work. They discuss the “House by Hand” 1821 Cape house restoration project and all the progress that has been made since the start of the year, with the goal of getting the Klein family moved into a somewhat completed building by winter. But how “finished” is finished enough? And what does the previous history of this house teach us about the iterative process of living in a structure while working on it? Drawing from Nevan Carling’s upcoming Issue Seventeen article,...
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Seventeen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come. The subscription window that includes Issue Seventeen is open now. To get Issue Seventeen when it ships in early October, you can sign up for a subscription here. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Seventeen is coming your way soon! ___________________________________ Nevan Carling – “Historic...
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Seventeen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come. The subscription window that includes Issue Seventeen is open now. To get Issue Seventeen when it ships in early October, you can sign up for a subscription here. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Seventeen is coming your way soon! ___________________________________ Edward Bouvier – “Handcraft...
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Seventeen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come. The subscription window that includes Issue Seventeen is open now. To get Issue Seventeen when it ships in early October, you can sign up for a subscription here. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Seventeen is coming your way soon! ___________________________________ Narelle Freeman – “Secrets...
There are no vises on Japanese benches. In fact, to a craftsman accustomed to Western woodworking, Japanese benches don’t look like workbenches at all. Author Toshio Odate notes: “Traditional tategu-shi do not use workbenches for planing. Planes are used either while standing at a planing beam (when working long material) or sitting at a planing board (for shorter material).” The planing beam is a smoothed and squared timber with one end held elevated on a triangular horse, while the other end rests on a block of wood. This is then butted against a wall or other immovable support. For a planing stop, usually a pair of nails driven into the beam suffices. Andrew Hunter, a furniture maker based in upstate...
The middle class was growing by leaps and bounds at the beginning of the 19th century, demanding cheap consumer goods. Retail showrooms, an ancestor of Rooms To Go, started popping up and eating into chairmakers’ profits. Windsor chairmakers quickly adjusted, redesigning their chairs, changing their joinery techniques, increasing their division of labor, and using interchangeable parts to speed up the chairmaking process. Did the Industrial Revolution really start in a chair shop? Early 19th-century chairmakers were fast. Really fast. In her book, Windsor-Chair Making in America, Nancy Goyne Evans calculates that a chairmaker making batches of two dozen side chairs – starting from the log and using all hand tools – could have a chair ready for finish in about...
As Shakers, we don’t look at ourselves as a guild of craftsmen, but as Believers. Being a Shaker means being a follower of Christ. Jesus instructed us to “be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and we seek to apply this to all we do. In Shakerism, personal perfection is something that unfolds over time. Although we might strive to make the best chair that we’ve ever made, in 10 years we should be able to say that we make them even better than we used to. But this is not to say that a Shaker craftsman would have identified himself as a furniture maker. Shakers see themselves as tied to the land, and because of...
Hand-tool woodworking in every tradition requires maintaining sharp edges. While I had no problem using sharpening jigs, I wanted to teach myself traditional freehand sharpening to understand its benefits. I quickly learned that I had underestimated the skills needed to sharpen a 70mm blade. In retrospect, sharpening a smaller plane would have made things easier for both me and my sharpening stones. In addition, Japanese plane blades are constructed differently than modern Western irons. They have high-carbon steel as the cutting edge, laminated with soft iron that forms the bulk of the body (such as in early Western planes). The steel is heat-treated to be quite hard for good edge retention, but that hardness can make sharpening (especially lapping the...
